Engineer. The way I see visionary used regarding leadership is “Visionary Leader”. But the noun definition of Visionary #7 I would have thought was a reasonable definition as you were suggesting to define it.
Since Santorum was taking a dig at his political opposition, the “context” clearly suggests you should take one of the negative connotations of “visionary”. Your argument that we WANTED a visionary assumes the positive definition of the term, which would be inapplicable to the context.
Which was the point I was trying to make in a humorous way — that there are many definitions of “visionary”, many of them have a negative connotation, Santorum was using that negative connotation to take a mild dig at Gingrich, and those who claimed he was saying he had no vision were the ones taking the comment out of context.
Now putting the Newt and Santorum thing aside for a second, I find your response fascinating - and I mean mostly in a good way.
That you are an engineer makes a ton of sense - you are very literal and very much a B type personality on this forum. That such a person is somewhat off put or offended by someone like Newt is also very much predictable.
What is not predictable is that you meant anything humorous in your post. Santorum is a perfectly humorless person from all I can tell, and I have spoken with him one on one for quite a while as well as observed him for 20 years off and on.
Thus, when he takes a light dig - a very literal person without a sense of humor who has followers mostly the same - that humor is going to be lost on many. I sure did not see it.